Utility customers or account holders are being increasingly approached by third party energy service companies, such as solar and energy efficiency companies, to perform energy upgrades or analyses of that utility account holder's utility usage or billing history. Examples of these services include, but are not limited to, installing and monitoring solar panels on a utility account holder's house or office building, performing energy or water audits of a facility to facilitate energy efficiency upgrades, monitoring a building's energy usage over time, and installing energy storage devices at a home or facility.
Before performing these services, the third party usually performs a feasibility analysis to determine whether the service is worth pursuing. Part of the input for these analyses is a utility account holder's utility usage and billing data. This input is needed to produce a proposal that compares the current cost of their utility usage and what their cost would be with the service. Similarly, after a service is performed, the data may be required to monitor and verify the performance of the asset. However, collecting and monitoring this input data is often a complex series of manual steps for the utility account holder. Utility account holders often become frustrated or disinterested in the third party service because the process of collecting the input data needed for the feasibility analysis takes so long or is too complex leading to lost sales and increasing the cost and time required to close a sale. Alternatively, because the data collection process is troublesome, third party services will sometimes estimate the input data for their proposal analyses, which can lead to inaccurate or overly conservative results and a service or project not being pursued because it is mistakenly thought to be inviable.